Behind the Chintz Curtain « Page 13 of 14 « We review erotic romance books and sex toys for women

Jul 12

Fancy a free erotic read? As promised, here’s the first instalment of The Garden of Earthly Delights - a tale about sexual submission (and coming to terms with it).

What’s the significance of the title? If you’re unfamiliar, The Garden of Earthly Delights is an oil-on-oak triptych (a three-part work) by the Dutch master, Hieronymus Bosch. Painted some time between 1490 and 1510, the centre panel depicts a kaleidoscope of human figures engaged in various sexual acts. American writer Peter Soyer Beagle once described it as an ‘erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty’.

Well, that sounds great to me. If you, too, like the idea of erotic liberty, then read on …

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS – PART ONE

‘Lift your skirt.’

The quiet command was delivered in a neutral tone but the power behind it was unmistakeable.

It was appallingly awful. Appallingly embarrassing. But the compulsion to obey was undeniable. It was hard to curl her fingers around the hem of her tweed pencil. Even harder to pull the fabric above her waist and hold it there – but she did it.

She stood, wearing a pair of purple cotton knickers and her soft white blouse, the skirt bunched around her waist. Absurdly, she wished she was wearing sexier underwear, and not the utilitarian pair she’d grabbed in her hurry to get ready for work that morning.

‘Tuck the hem into the waistband, remove your underwear, and kneel on the table.’ Continue reading →

Jul 11

Title: Captive in the Dark: The Dark Duet (Volume 1)
Author: C.J. Roberts
Publisher: C.J. Roberts (29 Aug 2011)
ISBN: 978-0615429502

I’m pretty bombproof when it comes to subject matter – there’s not a lot that can shock me – but if I’m going to tackle something harrowing, the balance has to be absolutely perfect: the writing has to be solid, the story clever, the characters worth the emotional investment. So having read the synopsis for this book on Amazon and come face-to-face with the pretty blunt warning about its content (‘This book contains very disturbing situations, dubious consent, strong language, and graphic violence’), I wondered how I would get on with Captive in the Dark and what I might be letting myself in for.

An amazing book, as it turned it. I am not exaggerating when I say C.J. Roberts – who wrote and published Captive in the Dark herself – had me in the palm of her hand from the prologue. Lately, it’s been a bit of a struggle to find BDSM erotica books that stand out from the crowd and have something truly unique about them (one power exchange plot can start to feel very much like another) but Captive had me absolutely glued. To the point that I couldn’t even put it down to do the dishes – and let me tell you, scrubbing a dirty pot one-handed is hard. I devoured the entire book in a day, that’s how good it was, and then immediately visited C.J. Roberts’s website to find out when Volume 2, Seduced in the Dark, was due. (As you’ve probably guessed from the title, Captive in the Dark is part of a series.) Continue reading →

Jul 10

What we used: LELO Luna Pleasure Bead System
From: Lovehoney
Price: £29.99
Material(s): FDA-approved body-safe silicone

The third in our series of posts on Christian Grey’s playthings, in which we review pleasure beads (a.k.a. ‘jiggle balls’, Ben Wa balls, Geisha balls) and discover that they make a bit of noise!

First impressions …

Lizzie
Nice. The packaging is very grown up and classy – not a topless porn-star in sight! There’s an outer case in white with the LELO branding on it, and inside that a heavy black cardboard box with ‘LELO’ embossed on the lid. Opening up the latter reveals four pleasure beads – two in ‘petal pink’ and two ‘powder blue’ – sitting in a moulded black plastic casing. The pink beads are encased in a flexible white sleeve (girdle) shaped like the number 8.

All the beads are made of transparent, coloured silicone and inside each one there is a small grey weight, roughly the size of a marble. (Shaking a bead causes the weight to rattle against the outer plastic sleeve but the noise it makes doesn’t seem particularly loud – more like a dull thudding.) Continue reading →

Jul 09

Title: The 52 Seductions
Author: Betty Herbert
Publisher: Headline (19 Jan 2012)
ISBN: 978-0755362530

It’s a ‘fifty’ book, but not the one you’re thinking of. The 52 Seductions began life as a blog, with the author, Betty Herbert, recording a series of seductions that she and her husband perform in in an attempt to kick-start their waning sex life.

Realising that, sexually speaking, things have started to go off the boil in their relationship despite them still being very much in love with one another (‘I am not prudish; I have just been married for ten years’), Betty talks ‘Herbert’, her husband, into engaging in a seduction every week for a year. Her theory is that sex begets more sex, and by ‘forcing’ themselves to make love, their desire for each other will increase in proportion to the amount they’re actually having. They agree that they’ll take turns devising them, with Betty dreaming up and organising a seduction one week and Herbert the next. What unfolds is book that charts Betty and Herbert’s rediscovery of one another and an examination of their attitudes towards sex in general.

One of the things this book does well is to highlight – very accurately – the hum-drum of long term partnerships while also pointing out that said hum-drum doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve fallen out of love with your significant other. It boldly acknowledges what’s likely true for a lot of long-term couples: that you’ve gone through the first, frenzied flush of sexual discovery, things have settled into a routine, and going outside of the status quo when you’ve been plodding along the same road at the same pace for some time takes some guts. Continue reading →

Jul 06

What we used: Bondage Boutique slim riding crop whip in red
From: Lovehoney
Price: £14.99
Material(s): Leather, plastic

The second in our series of posts on Christian Grey’s playthings, in which we discover that crops with slightly imperfect handles are extremely flexible and feel very, very nice when applied to one’s bottom.

Important: If you haven’t already, please read the Behind the Chintz Curtain Disclaimer.

First impressions …

Lizzie
The crop arrives in a long, plain, brown box the day after I order it. Quick, prompt, discrete. I wait until Thomas arrives home from work before breaking into the packaging as we want to examine the crop for the first time together.

Some frenzied ripping of tape from the box later and we find the crop encased in a clear plastic sleeve and tagged with a Bondage Boutique swing tag on the wrist strap.

The crop itself is 27.5 inches (69.85 centimetres) long, with a red leather tab at the business end. The shaft appears to be made of a flexible plastic cane (which Thomas takes great delight in flexing and bending into a U-shape to see just how malleable it really is – gulp). A leather wrist strap is fixed immediately below the painted wooden handle and, to be honest, the latter is the only visually disappointing feature; on the crop we receive, it is slightly scratched and chipped. That said, for £14.99 I’m more than happy to live with the imperfection, especially since I’m not sure if I’m going to like how it feels when applied! (Hey, there’s a recession going on.) Continue reading →

Jul 05

Title: Fifty Shades of Grey
Author: E.L. James
ISBN: 978-0099579939
Publisher: Arrow (26 April 2012)

I’ve procrastinated over whether to do a review for Fifty Shades of Grey because, frankly, there’s not a lot that I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. The coverage of – and the furore around – this book has been absolutely massive and you can’t seem to walk five paces without bumping into someone who’s reading it or having a conversation about it. It’s broken sales records set by J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard, Harry Potter, and is the first book ever to reach the one million sales mark on Amazon Kindle. If you’ve been living in a parallel universe and haven’t a clue what I’m going on about, here’s a brief run-down …

Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic romance written by British author E.L. James (a pseudonym for London T.V. executive Erika Leonard). It started life as fanfiction based on the characters and stories from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which James later reworked to create Fifty Shades of Grey and the two subsequent books in the series, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. To boil it right down to basics:

- Edward Cullen (wealthy blood-sucking vampire) becomes Christian Grey (wealthy flogger-wielding sadist);

- Bella Swan (virginal high school student) becomes Anastasia Steele (virginal college graduate);

- Forks (small Pacific North West town) becomes Seattle (large Pacific North West city). Continue reading →

Jul 04

What we used: ’Freedom is deciding whose slave you want to be’ blindfold
From: Coco de Mer U.K.
Price: £25.50
Material(s): Silk

The first in our series of posts on Christian Grey’s playthings, in which we discover that silk blindfolds feel lovely but are very, very hard to keep in place …

First impressions …

Lizzie
This blindfold is beautiful. It’s gorgeously soft, feels wonderfully silky to the touch, and the words ‘Freedom is deciding whose slave you want to be’ are stitched in a pretty scripted font in the middle of the outward-facing panel. The Coco de Mer logo is embroidered at the right-hand end. All-in-all, very seductive and a million miles from sleazy and cheap. I’m impressed – and a bit surprised! – that Thomas has chosen this for me; it’s far sexier than a hanky or one of my pashminas, but being an average bloke, they’re exactly what I’d expect him to be wrapping around my head in place of this!

Thomas
The blindfold came in quality packaging from Coco de Mer along with several other items, none of which looked cheap or tacky, which is to be avoided at all costs if you are shopping for toys. The blindfold is of decent silk and is well made with black embroidery on one side. It has a nice look and feel and you won’t be embarrassed to whip it out (so to speak) on your partner. Continue reading →

Jul 04

Title: The Dirty Bits for Girls
Author: India Knight (editor)
ISBN: 978-1844082285
Publisher: Virago UK (March 1, 2009)

The Dirty Bits for Girls has been around for a while – it was first published in 2006 – but I’m offering it up because 1) it’s a great read and 2) because it gives you enlightening glimpses into books that you might not have considered picking up otherwise.

This collection of ‘dirty’ excerpts runs the gamut – Georgette Heyer, Anaïs Nin, John Cleland, Jilly Cooper, to name just a few of the authors whose work appears in it – and, as such, caters to pretty much every taste. From the over-the-top soap opera sex of 80s Judith Krantz (Scruples) to the dark eroticism of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, Dirty Bits serves up a tasting menu of sex in literature and is perfect as means of steering you towards the books that do it for you and away from the ones that don’t.

The extract from Georgette Heyer’s Regency Buck with its smouldering, rakish hero, the Earl of Worth (a.k.a. Julian St John Audley), is toe-curlingly good. At the risk of sounding like a giddy thirteen-year-old, the guy is hot. He’s handsome. He’s arrogant. He’s dominating. He’s insolent. There’s not a single ‘traditional’ sex scene in the excerpt (or in the entire book for that matter) – the raciest it gets is a raised hem and a kiss in the back of a curricle-and-four – but the sexual frisson between him and Judith, the heroine, is brilliant. Reading this particular snippet sent me into something of a Heyer frenzy and I consumed a number of her Regency ton romances in short order after reading the Dirty Bits taster. A perfect and satisfying example of Alpha male versus feisty, spirited heroine, with sexual chemistry to boot. Continue reading →

Jul 03

Okay. You’ve read Fifty Shades of Grey and you’re curious. What exactly happens when people play with all those things in the bedroom in real life? You know, those, er, ‘toys’?

Before Fifty came on the scene, the items that Christian Grey uses during his sexual encounters with Anastasia Steele were probably a bit outside the standard sexual behaviour box for a good many people. But if this book has done one thing by going mainstream, regardless of what you think of its origins, the writing, and the way it portrays the BDSM lifestyle, it has opened the door for candid conversations between partners and – hopefully – allowed them to communicate more openly about things they’d like to try in (or out of) the bedroom.

That said, it’s one thing to read about these sorts of things in a book and quite another to go out, buy up the hardware aisle at Homebase, and experiment with your significant other. So, to quench your curiosity, we’re going to roadtest (well, our reviewers Lizzie and Thomas are) four of the items from E.L. James’s record-breaking novel – the blindfold, the crop, ‘the beads’ and the handcuffs – to help you decide whether you’d like to try them out yourself.

We’ll be posting the reviews in instalments, so make sure you visit Chintz later this week for the first in the series.

Fifty Shades of Grey is available from: Amazon.co.uk (Kindle ; paperback), Amazon.com (Kindle ; paperback), Barnes & Noble (Nook ; paperback), Kobo (eBook).

Jul 03

The first Chintz Words post will be up soon – promise! We’ll be kicking off with the first instalment of a story titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. Thanks for being patient.

Image: The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel detail, 1480-1490 – Hieronymus Bosch

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